Rediscovering the Tower Hamlets Neighbourhoods – Part 1

Remember the Tower Hamlets Neighbourhoods? As an experiment in political devolution they only lasted from 1986 to 1994, so you could be forgiven for having forgotten about them. Building a sense of neighbourhood identity was an essential element of the scheme and on a crisp and cold morning in January 2017, I went on a walk around Tower Hamlets to see what remained visually of the Neighbourhoods. Given that they had been abandoned 23 years earlier, I wasn’t hopeful of finding much…

I’ll come on to the walk and what I found in the next post, but first a recap on the Neighbourhoods. There is a whole history to be written about local politics in Tower Hamlets and it is well beyond my means to attempt such a thing, so please excuse the crude summary of this part of the story.

Tower Hamlets and its predecessor authorities (Poplar, Stepney and Bethnal Green), were traditionally solid working class Labour areas. In his excellent book Rebel Footprints (1), David Rosenberg brings to life the rich political history of the area and its central place in the growth of municipal socialism and the Labour movement.

In the early 1980s, when Labour’s new urban left assumed power in many Inner London Town Halls (and in County Hall), the Tower Hamlets Labour group remained on the right of the party. There had been no Lambeth-style revolution within the local Labour Group, so the job of filling the radical void was largely left to others. The “others”, in this case, were a highly organised “Liberal Focus” group.

Tower Hamlets in the 1970s and 80s faced many interlinked issues including severe deprivation, a deteriorating housing stock, the decline of the area’s traditional industries, the closure of the docks and rising racial tensions. Added to the mix in the eighties was a controversial interloper in the form of the London Docklands Development Corporation which took over strategic control of the regeneration of a large part of the Borough.

These factors (especially housing) appear to have created a fertile environment for the Liberals. The Liberal strength grew slowly with seven elected members from 1978-82 and 19 (out of a possible 50) from 1982-86.

And then, in 1986, the Liberals took control of the Borough, with a one vote majority. Their manifesto “Power to the Hamlets” proposed a radical new form of decentralised local government. Seven Neighbourhoods were to be created: Bethnal Green, Bow, Globe Town, Isle of Dogs, Poplar, Stepney and Wapping. Each would be run by an autonomous local committee. Each would be given its own Chief Executive and almost all services, and a number of “back office” functions would be devolved down to Neighbourhood level.

The detail of how the Neighbourhoods operated and their effectiveness are covered superbly by Janice Morphet (2) and Vivien Lowndes and Gerry Stoker (3). I won’t disrespect their work by trying to condense it here. I urge you to read them.

Whatever the academic conclusion on effectiveness (and it was far from clear cut), it was ultimately public opinion and the ballot box that killed off the Neighbourhoods. The Liberals, by now constituted as the Liberal Democrats, consolidated their position in the 1990 local elections, securing another four years for the Neighbourhoods. Yet despite the victory, public opinion was shifting. One much mentioned gripe centred on the difficulty in Council tenants moving home between Neighbourhoods – one former employee suggested to me that it was easier to move out of the Borough than within it. As the Independent (4) reported:

“An elderly resident living at one end of Salmon Lane in Poplar requiring the support of a relative that lives at the other end of Salmon Lane in Stepney would be unable to move under the old [Neighbourhood] system.”

The most controversial aspect of the whole story (one might be tempted to say “sorry saga” by 1993) related to the actions of local Liberal Democrat activists and allegations of racist leafleting. By making a series of claims that Labour-controlled Neighbourhoods disadvantaged the local white population in housing allocations, the Liberal Democrats ignited a race row that many linked to the 1993 by-election victory of the British National Party on the Isle of Dogs. Paddy Ashdown, then party leader, ordered an inquiry which went on to recommend the expulsion of certain party members and criticised various levels of the party structure for failing to address issues that it concluded had been known about for some time.

Embroiled in scandal, unloved by the national Liberal Democrat party and finally thrown out by the electorate (the Lib Dems won just 7 of the Council’s 50 seats in 1994), the Neighbourhood experiment was over. The incoming Labour administration quickly moved back to a more traditional local authority structure and the Neighbourhoods were no more.

In the next post, a journey round the Borough to explore the visual remains of this experiment…